Michael Agger at Slate writes about the financial return on blogging, and his findings validate every blogger’s secret fear: In the grand scheme of things, we ain’t worth shit. Unless, says Technorati, we’re raking in a 100,000 or more unique visitors a month. In which case median annual revenue is roughly (wtf?) $75K+. All I need is for 100,000 of my closest friends to check out my blog once a month, click on a few penile enhancement ads, and I’ll be set. So long Creative Loafing!

But wait–I could continue to blog here @ City Desk with Gawker’s pay model, which pays $6.50 for every thousand page views. I’d have a reason to get dressed in the morning, brush my teeth, shave my uni-brow, etc., etc. I’d feel compelled to offer City Desk readers my best writing, my wittiest quips, my most intimate anecdotes. And based on the page views I’ve earned thus far, I’d make about…$12 every seven days or so. Fuck yea! That’s enough for one pack of cigarettes a week and a dollar-menu item per day!

Disclaimer: Bloggers who are susceptible to reality checks and/or own firearms should avoid reading Agger’s piece at all costs. Mostly to keep from learning how much Perez Hilton makes in a year. (I think Agger may have a typo in his story, but if the number he puts forward–$111,000 per month–is accurate, then Perez Hilton makes over a million dollars a year. A Million Fucking Dollars For Drawing Semen On AP Photos. [Dear god, I haven't asked you for anything since my sophomore year of college when I came down with food poisoning and shit my pants/vomited into my lap in front of all my friends, and I asked you to kill them for laughing at me, but I'm asking you now: Let that stat be a typo.])

Regardless of how much PH makes, I know this: I should have gone to law school.

Last minute addendum: The following arrived in an email from boss-man Erik Wemple (new title: King of the Downers), which he excerpted from a Paul Farhi piece. “Newspapers that were hoping to be rescued by their online ad businesses woke up to a sobering reality in mid-2007. By then, it was becoming clear that online advertising wasn’t growing fast enough to make up for the rapid disappearance of print ads (see “Online Salvation?” December 2007/January 2008). In fact, at the moment, online ads aren’t growing at all. Sales at newspaper Web sites fell 2.4 percent in the second quarter of 2008. This may be as ominous a development as the meltdown of print. Online newspaper revenues had grown smartly in every quarter since the Newspaper Association of America began tracking them in 2003. No longer.”

Maybe this is the last word on pigs. Or this. Or this. Or this. Let’s hope that today brings zero talk of pigs and lipstick.

Let’s hope Charlie Gibson actually asks Sarah Palin some tough questions.

Update: 2:16 a.m. WSJ has a bit of breaking news on that troopergate scandal.

As a kid I was a big fan of the Stephen King-written 1986 coming-of-age tale Stand By Me—a movie that included one of the most intense on-screen vomit sessions ever to be committed to celluloid. So I’ll admit, accompanying Amanda Hess as she reported this week’s Show & Tell column about the “Spaghetti Bros”—a performance-art piece by GWU grad students Gina Tibbott and Kenny George that involved the pair playing beer pong with ice-cold Spaghettios for three hours while listening to hair-metal–was a little bittersweet for me. On one hand, it was entertaining for much the same reasons I enjoyed this. On the other hand, it involved three hours of sitting in a room that smelled like the kitchen of Bucca Di Beppo might if the cooks had spent a whole day boiling Cheetos. Near the end it was almost like watching a particularly competitive basketball game. Every shot counted, the participants were pushed to their physical limits, and the last five minutes seemed to drag on for an eternity. But if there was a victor in the end, I can’t really say who it was. Honestly, it was all I could do to hold the video camera.